Suchergebnisse

This thesis analyses several political economy mechanisms surrounding economic development and development cooperation. In Chapter 1, I show that foreign policy alignment changes following leader changes in both recipient and donor countries impact the allocation of Official Development Aid. In addition, I highlight that leader changes are a natural breaking point for bilateral relations that make usually inconsequential actions matter. In Chapter 2, I find that development aid affects civil conflict dynamics within recipient countries in previously unknown ways. Aid seems to have an escalating effect on civil conflict during episodes of minor violence, but no effect on civil conflict once violence is widespread. In Chapter 3, I analyze the effect of territorial decentralization and centralization on economic development in a global sample of primary subnational units. I show that the economic benefits of these reforms are very context-specific. Centralization reforms increase economic development in Africa, while decentralization reforms have been successful in Asia. Additionally, there are differential effects within treated areas. Centralization reforms are less beneficial for areas that move to the political periphery, while decentralization yields bigger economic payoffs in countries that have local accountability in the form of local elections. Chapter 4 turns the focus to OECD countries and analyses how international migration affects the probability of terrorism. Even though increases in the foreign-born population increase the risk of terrorism, the effect is indistinguishable from increases in the native-born population. What is more, restricting the rights of migrants does not diminish but increase the effect of migrants on terror. In summary, the thesis highlights that several political economy mechanisms in the context of development and political conflict are much more context and time dependent than previously thought.

This paper investigates a new mechanism to explain politically induced changes in bilateral aid. We argue that shifts in the foreign policy alignment between a donor and a recipient country following leadership changes induce reallocation of aid. Utilizing data from the G7 and 130 developing countries between 1975 and 2012 and employing high dimensional fixed effects models, we show that incoming leaders in recipient countries, which politically converge towards their current donors, receive more aid commitments, compared to those that diverge. Accounting for donor leader change, we additionally find that incumbent recipient leaders have an opportunity to get even more aid when political change in donor countries moves them closer to the donor's foreign policy position. Thus, leadership turnover in recipient and donor countries makes otherwise inconsequential deviations in foreign policy alignment highly consequential for aid provision.

We present a new mechanism to explain politically induced changes in bilateral aid. We argue that shifts in the foreign policy alignment between a donor and a recipient country arising from leadership changes induce reallocation of development aid. Utilizing data from the G7 and 133 developing countries between 1975 and 2012, we show that incoming leaders in recipient countries that politically converge towards their donors receive more aid commitments, compared to those that diverge. Additionally taking donor leader change into account, we find that incumbent recipient leaders have an opportunity to get even more aid when political change in donor countries moves them closer to the donor's foreign policy position. Thus, leadership turnover in recipient and donor countries constitutes a potential breaking point in foreign relations. Otherwise inconsequential deviations in voting alignment become highly consequential for aid provision.

We investigate how changes in the administrative-territorial structure affect ethnic voting. We present an event study design that exploits the 2010 constitutional reform in Kenya, which substantially increased the number of primary administrative regions. We find (i) strong evidence for a reduction in ethnic voting when administrative regions become less ethnically diverse and (ii) weak evidence for such a reduction when ethnic groups become less fragmented across regions. These results suggest that 'ethnofederal' reforms (leading to administrative borders that more closely follow ethnic boundaries) can mitigate ethnic politics in diverse countries.

We study the link between subnational capital cities and urban development using a global data set of hundreds of first-order administrative and capital city reforms from 1987 until 2018. We show that gaining subnational capital status has a sizable effect on city growth in the medium run. We provide new evidence that the effect of these reforms depends on locational fundamentals, such as market access, and that the effect is greater in countries where urbanization and industrialization occurred later. Consistent with both an influx of public investments and a private response of individuals and firms, we document that urban built-up, population, foreign aid, infrastructure, and foreign direct investment in several sectors increase once cities become subnational capitals.

AbstractWe analyze how a country's immigrant population—defined as the stock of people born abroad—affects the probability of a terrorist attack in the host country. Using data for 20 OECD host countries and 183 countries of origin over the 1980–2010 period our OLS and 2SLS regressions show that the probability that immigrants from a specific country of origin conduct a terrorist attack in their host country increases with a larger number of foreigners from such countries living there. However, this scale effect does not differ from the effect domestic populations have on domestic terror. We find scarce evidence that terror is systematically imported from countries with large Muslim populations or countries where terror networks prevail. Policies that exclude foreigners already living in a country increase rather than reduce the risk that foreign populations turn violent, and so do terrorist attacks against foreigners in their host country. Highly skilled migrants are associated with a significantly lower risk of terror compared with low skilled ones, while there is no significant difference between foreign‐born men and women.